Gaza-Israel conflict: US, UN seek Israel-Gaza ceasefire font size Print Email 23.Jul.2014 0 Comments Rate this item (0 votes) United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and United States Secretary of State, John Kerry are continuing meetings with officials in Cairo, in a bid to bring an end to fighting between Israel and Hamas. The two-week-old conflict showed no sign of slowing early Tuesday. Israeli airstrikes hit more than 70 targets, including mosques, a sports stadium and the home of the late Hamas military chief across the Gaza Strip, a Gaza police official told the Associated Press. At least 10 people were killed. Meanwhile, rockets from Gaza flew into Israel. Kerry met early Tuesday with Palestinian intelligence chief Majid Faraj before holding talks with Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shukri. Both Kerry and Shukri said they hoped to not only achieve a cease-fire, but also move forward with the larger Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Ban, who has urged both sides to immediately halt the violence and start negotiations without preconditions, is due to travel to Israel for a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and to the West Bank to talk with Palestinian officials. Meanwhile, the Israeli military said it had identified the bodies of six soldiers killed when their vehicle was attacked on Sunday. It’s still working to identify a seventh soldier. Israeli media said the soldier was missing, but did not say whether he was alive or dead. A Hamas spokesman said Sunday that militants had captured an Israeli soldier in Gaza. Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations said that was “untrue.” The military also announced the deaths of two soldiers from Monday, bringing the Israeli death toll to 29, including two civilians, in the deadliest fighting in Gaza in five years. The conflict has been far more devastating in the Palestinian territory, where more than 570 people have died since the conflict began July 8. Most of them were civilians. Also Tuesday, gunfire hit the Gaza City offices of Al-Jazeera news network, which evacuated its employees from the site. An Israeli official said it would be “ridiculous” to accuse its forces of deliberately targeting journalists. Israel began a ground offensive into Gaza last Thursday after airstrikes failed to stop Hamas cross-border rocket attacks. President Barack Obama said he sent Kerry to Cairo to push for an immediate cessation of hostilities based on a return to the November 2012 cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. “The work will not be easy. Obviously, there are enormous passions involved in this and some very difficult strategic issues involved,” Obama said Monday at the White House. “Nevertheless, I’ve asked John to do everything he can to help facilitate a cessation to hostilities. We don’t want to see any more civilians getting killed.” Senior State Department officials traveling with Kerry said “growing concern” in Washington about rising civilian casualties prompted this trip. Restoring the 2012 cease-fire is more difficult because of the change in Cairo’s government. Former Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood negotiated that deal, in part, on the strength of long-standing ties with Hamas. Egypt’s new leader, the former general Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, is far less sympathetic to Hamas, meaning Kerry needs to include Hamas backers such as Qatar and Turkey. But Qatar and Egypt are at odds over the treatment of the Muslim Brotherhood since the coup against Morsi. And acrimony between Turkey and Israel has grown since Israeli troops entered Gaza, with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan calling Israel a terrorist state that is attempting a “systematic genocide” against Palestinians. Israeli soldier kidnapped by Hamas is dead, says army The Israeli army on Tuesday confirmed that a soldier who Hamas militants claimed they had kidnapped is dead and his body remains unaccounted for. According to the Guardian, UK, report, the army named the soldier, whose body is still missing, as Oron Shaul, two days after Hamas said they had kidnapped an Israeli soldier of the same name. A spokeswoman said Israeli pathologists had identified 12 out of 13 soldiers killed in Gaza over the weekend but that 21-year-old Shaul’s body was still unaccounted for. Publication of the name suggested Hamas was likely to be holding the soldier’s remains, although it was not clear if the entire body or only part of it was missing. Israeli dog tags carry a soldier’s name and his army number, and are designed to be broken in two, with half worn around the neck and the other half inserted into his boot to allow for identification in the event of death. Shaul was part of a group of seven troops from the elite Golani unit who died in an attack on an armoured vehicle in Gaza. A spokesman flatly denied any possibility that the soldier was alive. “The identification process of six of the soldiers killed has been completed and confirmed. The efforts to identify the seventh soldier are ongoing and have yet to be determined,” an army statement said. The army refused to confirm or deny Hamas’s claim on Sunday night, saying it was investigating, although Israel’s ambassador to the UN Ron Prosor said the rumours of an abduction were “untrue”. Hamas militants have long sought to abduct soldiers to use as bargaining chips to obtain the release of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. In 2006, it captured conscript Gilad Shalit and held him for five years before freeing him in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. In the same year, Lebanon’s Hizbollah also seized and killed two soldiers, triggering a devastating war with Israel, and later handing over their remains in a massive prisoner exchange. The death of 13 soldiers on Sunday was the highest single-day death toll sustained by the Israeli army since the 2006 Lebanon war. US Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday discussed proposals for a Gaza ceasefire with Egypt, as both sides voiced guarded hopes of ending the bloodshed. Kerry, who arrived late on Monday in the wake of growing casualties from the Israeli-Hamas conflict, held talks in Cairo on Monday with UN chief Ban Ki-moon, who has also come to the Egyptian capital to push for a truce. Kerry on Tuesday met the Egyptian leadership, including President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the former army chief who overthrew the Islamist government last year and cracked down on its supporters. “We are hopeful that this visit will result in a ceasefire that provides the necessary security for the Palestinian people and that we can commence to address the medium- and long-term issues related to Gaza,” Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukri told reporters ahead of Kerry’s talks with Sisi. Kerry voiced appreciation to Egypt for proposing a truce that was embraced by Israel but rejected by Hamas, which has tense ties with Cairo’s new government and has refused to end violence unless Israel ends its eight-year blockade of the Gaza Strip. ... Denounce ISIL persecution of Iraqi minorities The United States and U.N. Security Council Monday denounced the persecution of Iraqi minorities under the control of radical Sunni militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which seeks to create a caliphate across parts of Iraq and Syria. According to VOA, the condemnations followed the issuance of a decree by ISIL that Christians and other non-Muslims under its control must convert to Islam, pay a special tax, leave or face execution. U.S. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf Monday denounced ISIL’s declaration Saturday, which impacted Christians, as well as Shi’ite Muslims, Yazidis (Kurds linked to Zoroastrianism) and Shabaks. Many have fled the northern Iraqi city of Mosul and surrounding towns. “We condemn in the strongest terms the systematic persecution of ethnic and religious minorities by ISIL. We are particularly outraged by ISIL’s recent announcement that Christians in Mosul must convert, pay a tax, leave or face execution in coming days. These are abominable acts,” said Harf. “We are very clear that they only further demonstrate ISIL’s mission to divide and destroy Iraq, and they have absolutely no place in the future of Iraq. We could not be clearer.” Late Monday, the U.N. Security Council issued a unanimous declaration denouncing what it calls “the systematic persecution of individuals from minority populations” and those who refuse the “extremist ideology” of ISIL and associated armed groups. The Council said such attacks “may constitute a crime against humanity, for which those responsible must be held accountable.” The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Monday also condemned ISIL for what it calls the “forced deportation” of Christians under the threat of execution, “thus further tearing apart the social fabric of the Iraqi people.” OIC Secretary-General Iyad Ameen Madani condemned what he called “the terrorist group” and said such atrocities contradict the principles of the OIC “that call for the entrenchment of a culture of tolerance and affinity among all nations and peoples.” Hundreds of Christian families left Mosul, where they once numbered in the tens of thousands and traced their presence back 1400 years. The group Open Doors, which monitors the persecution of Christians, said, while some families chose to stay and pay the tax, those who fled were sometimes stopped at checkpoints by militants and had their money, jewelry, mobile phones and medicine confiscated. According to Patriarch Louis Sako, a senior Christian cleric in Iraq, many Christians from Mosul are fleeing to the autonomous region of Kurdistan. Greg Barton, of the Center for Islam and the Modern World at Australia’s Monash University, said those Christians who remain under ISIL control will be vulnerable. “We’ve seen creeping persecution of Christians across the Middle East by hardline bullies with governments not doing enough to stand up and face it, and now this has reached a peak in ISIL’s caliphate,” he stated. Barton said, while the international condemnation will have no impact on ISIL, it may serve other purposes. “It will help those voices in Baghdad calling for a new Iraqi government to take a more principled position and it should make it easier for Christians fleeing Mosul and other towns in the north to find sanctuary in Baghdad, but, unfortunately, the last decade has seen a lot of persecution in Baghdad, so one can imagine that a lot will flee the country, if they can,” he added. Barton said it will be up to ISIL leadership to decide whether to chart a less radical course over the territory and people it now controls. He said that could help it consolidate support among more moderate Sunnis. Otherwise, he said, a harsher form of Sharia law could turn the populace against it. Gunshots fired at Al Jazeera bureau in Gaza, AP evacuates office Gunshots have been fired into Al Jazeera’s bureau in the Gaza Strip amid an intensified bombardment campaign on the Palestinian enclave. The shots caused panic among the civilians living in the same building but no casualties have been reported in the incident on Tuesday morning. “Two very precise shots were fired straight into our building,” Al Jazeera’s Stefanie Dekker, reporting from the bureau in Gaza said. “We are high up in the building so we had a very strong vantage point over the area. But we have evacuated.” The bureau is situated in a residential area of Gaza City. “Our office building also has many residential apartments. People (are) leaving, panicked. The AP (news agency) also has office there and (has) evacuated.” The attack came a day after Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman was quoted by local media as saying his country will work to close down Al Jazeera in Israel. Al Jazeera “has abandoned even the perception of being a reliable news organisation and broadcasts from Gaza and to the world anti-Israel incitement, lies, and encouragement to the terrorists,” Lieberman said. Al Jazeera has been covering the Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip that started on July 8. The network considers Lierberman’s comments a very serious matter. Israel is accountable for the safety of Al Jazeera teams working in Israel and the Palestinian territories The death toll in Israel’s 14-day assault climbed to more than 607 Palestinians, including dozens of women and children. More than 3,700 others have been injured. ADVERTISEMENT On the Israeli side, 27 troops and two civilians have been killed.
Posted on: Wed, 23 Jul 2014 21:34:56 +0000
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